let's PARTY i'm kind of...iffy? abt how akira's relationship w/ cain is written but that's mostly because akira, despite being a fully fleshed out character unto themself, is still kind of...left intentionally vague so as to act as a self-insert for the player and i often get frustrated by things like that because of how much i love doing in-depth analysis (as you can. tell

but ANYWAYS. despite the disclaimer i put up there, i have overall a mostly positive impression of their relationship! akira is the only member of the cast other than owen to actually take note of how much cain is struggling; the anni4 card is a beautiful reminder of that fact! my criticisms of their relationship honestly just mostly come from the fact that akira's lack of agency as a character, due to their existence as a self-insert, means that they're never going to rock cain's world the way i personally think needs to happen for him to Get Better. knowing too much about story structure and that there's a certain base "status quo" that's never going to be shaken in live service games has done nothing but contribute to my own agony

mhyk DOES do a lot more than i expect it to in regards to shaking up that status quo, though, so maybe i'll be pleasantly surprised! which is how we come to the next point: in the cain villain arc that i love talking about so much, cain caging akira is probably the most likely of all his potential targets, but he also...keeps a specific amount of distance from akira that makes me think this is somewhat unlikely.

i have a Whole Bunch. of his cards now and i love listening to all his home screen lines/reading card stories/etc and something he's very consistent about whenever he says something that leans closer to affectionate with akira he like...then immediately backtracks by going "but that's only because i'm a sage's wizard" instead of letting his statements stand for themselves. for instance his 3rd bday card (the set where everyone's in the pretty greco-roman inspired costumes!) his homescreen line has him asking akira (the player) to stay with him until the date changes...and then saying that he values time with akira because he's a sage's wizard, not for any other reason. which is a little bit sad to me

i think that akira and cain's relationship is one that deepest exemplifies how cain actively refuses to build close relationships with people even when he wants to. he wants akira to rely on him and says as much on a pretty regular basis, but he never returns the favor by letting himself rely on akira. i think it's the relationship of his i'm most melancholy about to be honest, if only because we get to see so clearly how he's deliberately keeping akira at arm's length instead of building the deeper relationship that he clearly wants to have, and that's a barrier that's...really hard for me to figure out how to cross when writing his relationships with others in a way that still preserves everything else about his character considering how central it is to him as a person

...........which is why i think something really big needs to happen that completely explodes everything about his life. but hey!